A bit over three and a half years ago we bought our first continuous-scanning-capable CMM, a Global S Blue 9.12.8 with a HP-S-X1 scanning head (I believe that's just Hexagon's rebranding of the Leitz LSPX line) and Hexagon's 7.5 degree indexable auto wrist, the HH-AS8-T7.5. What the machine has allowed us to do has been amazing, and on the whole we're very happy with the system.
We've never crashed it badly (as in, nothing big enough to make any visible dents on either the scanning probe or the wrist), though I did put too much torque on the scanning head trying to set up a star probe at one point and had to replace that.
Over the course of the last week or so we've had repeated instances of the wrist not seating - sometimes it will try multiple times and then succeed, other times it will not succeed and then just give up. This morning I had to power cycle the entire system to get it to work after it gave up. From what I've seen this behavior points to a failure of the wrist that will require a replacement.
We use the machine frequently over two shifts, five days a week, but beyond the regular use I don't think we do anything that should be particularly hard on it. I see pictures in Hexagon's marketing literature of these heads waving around huge laser scanners that must weigh a good bit more than the scanning head we have on it. Is this seemingly-short lifespan normal? Did we just get a bad egg? Is there something in our use or programming that could be causing more than typical wear? My boss is not very happy at the thought of having to replace these so frequently. Any ideas would be appreciated.
Heard others reporting the same issue with the Tesa head, malfunctions when it comes to the locking mechanism. We do have one of these, coming up on 8 years now, never been replaced and has not yet displayed any locking issues (knock on wood).
Back when we bought the machine, supposedly we could have gotten it with a Renishaw wrist and contact probe. Obviously the sales guy wasn't pushing that. I'm thinking it's probably more of a pain then I realized at first, though, to retrofit...
When we got our Global, they were pushing for their head. We were not getting rid of the old machine, we were 'doubling' the size of the lab. I told them, in no uncertain terms, that since we have a machine using a PH9 (at the time) head, that the new machine was going to have the PH10 head (same size and not lopsided) because I didn't want to have to program everything twice. We got the PH10 head.
in our company, we are running 3shifts/5day, 2 wrists/2 probes (2 different machines) already replaced after aprox. 5 years.., i stick with opinion: precise but fragile
If we would have realized the longevity issues with the Hexagon heads, we probably would have insisted on the Renishaw equipment too. Now we just need to make do with the junk...
Also, I poked around some of the "Related Topics" threads at the bottom of this page and found
this post interesting. We had a 200mm star probe conglomeration on there for a couple of years; we never spun/waved it around with the wrist, but it would do its post-tip-change unlock/relock with it. Perhaps that did some damage over time.
It could just need relinearizing, this happened to us on one of our machines after around 6 years, we also had the tool change speed slowed as the tech deemed it to quick and could have been causing a problem, the wrist did eventually get changed but we had 9 years out of it in total, the wrist on the other machine had to be swapped after around 7 years but this machine had a hard life